The GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DS3R board is an interesting motherboard in this day and age of economic crisis. While the Core i7 and the like outperform the P45 and X48 motherboards with the Core 2 Duo and AMD Phenom II CPUs by a wide margin, the COO (Cost Of Ownership) of the new platform is also much higher. You can buy a Quad Core CPU, DDR3 memory and this motherboard for a much lower price than buying the Core i7 platform. This provides a good level of performance without the need for buying three sticks of DDR3 memory, a new $300 motherboard and the CPU. This is where a under $100 motherboard like the EP45T-DS3R fits in the market. Performance is a little under that you would expect from a X48 board but the P45 chipset is still excellent for what it does.